When Parsippany teen Jacob Rudoph approached the state Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee in Trenton Monday, he lent a voice to a virtual chorus of 112,000.

Rudolph testified before the committee in support of S2278, which would ban so-called "gay conversion" therapy for minors. As reported Monday by the Star-Ledger, the panel approved the bill 7-1, with two abstentions. It now advances to the full Senate.

And its that attention that helped Rudolph attract more than 112,000 signatures to a Change.org petition urging a ban on gay-conversion therapy. In the petition, Rudolph and supporters ask Gov. Chris Christie to back such a ban, as the governor has yet to take a public position on the issue.

A spokesman for the governor's office recently confirmed to NJ.com the office was indeed receiving the virtual signatures to the petition, and said the governor would review the bill if it reaches a final form and vote.

In his testimony Monday, Rudolph told the senate panel gay conversion therapy can be damaging and frightful rejection for a teen struggling with his or her own identity.

But Rudolph said he first became aware of his own sexual orientation in the ninth grade — and the pressure of hiding it from the world was debilitating. "My orientation was just dragging me down emotionally," he said. Though he knew his parents would be supportive, he said, he worried about depriving them of the joys a parent feels when a child gets married, or has a child.

CONNECT WITH US

After his coming-out video went viral, Rudolph said, he heard from countless teens who'd gone through a similar experience. But he said five were particularly meaningful — because those five teens had made preparations to commit suicide before seeing his video.

"Some of these teens had been rejected by their families, who believed that they had chosen to be gay, and these families refused to accept them for who they are," Rudolph said.

He said the government has an obligation to protect minors, who don't have the legal right to make all of the same decisions as adults.

"I cannot fathom how emotionally scarring it must be for these kids to be told that they are somehow broken, and are then manipulated to reject their innate sexual preferences and become heterosexual again," Rudolph said.

At the senate panel hearing Monday, the panel heard from other teens as well — including a transgender teen now known as Brielle Sophia Goldani, who said she tried to kill herself three times after a series of conversion treatments, The Star-Ledger reported.

Goldani, born a boy, had gone through "flirting classes" to develop skills for socializing with girls, was ordered to masturbate to women’s images, underwent electric shock treatments, and was given medicine to induce vomiting after looking at photos of men holding hands, Goldani testified.

But Christopher Doyle, a counselor at the California-based International
Healing Foundation who said he is a former homosexual, said such stories are of exceptions, not typical practices.

Republican Sam Thompson, the only panel member to vote against the bill, said he worried the law could drive parents to unlicenced therapists. Sen. Dawn Addiego (R-Burlington), who abstained, said she didn't want it to limit the kinds of issues
therapists and their patients could discuss.

And Tara King, a licensed therapist in Brick, urged the committee not to
interfere with her work. King said she'd undergone therapy herself: "It wasn't until I
was 24 and a former lover told me she was seeking therapy specifically
to get out of homosexuality that for the first time in my life I had
heard it was a choice."

A version of the bill is expected to be heard by the New Jersey Assembly in April.